Does Santa Exist?

Eric Kaplan Little,

ERIC Kaplan’s Does Santa Exist? might seem a perfect fit for the ‘toilet read’ genre — a whimsical ‘philosophical investigation’ by a comedy screenwriter whose credits include The Big Bang Theory and The Simpsons.

But the book is odder and deeper than that. Kaplan is a Berkeley-trained philosopher and former Buddhist monk, whose late brother had Down’s Syndrome.

Kaplan is now a student of the Kabbalah ‘philosophy’, and this book is the story of his intellectual and spiritual development, which encompasses Confucius, Aquinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Kaplan extends the question of Santa’s existence into an enquiry into the meaning of life.

He examines the rival claims of rationalism, mysticism and comedy as answers to life’s thorniest paradoxes.

Kaplan wears his learning lightly and has some good jokes (I like his crack that Proust’s final volume, Time Regained, is a spoiler for the whole sequence). Compassionate and enlightened, this Christmas ‘toilet book’ offers compelling answers to life’s biggest questions.